On Monday I left Middlemarch at work, so I started For the Thrill of It, the story of Leopold and Loeb. It's very good! But I went back yesterday to pick up Middlemarch, and last night returned to the painful story of Rosamond and Tertius. I only recently realized I picture the exquisite Rosamund Pike as the poisonously poised Rosamond Vincy, and it's not just the similarity in their first names. Rosamond Vincy is like Pike's character in Gone Girl: perfect at appearing the way you want to see her. "Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own."

Even in tense moments, her beauty serves to distract and soothe. "As she came towards him in her drapery of transparent faintly-tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful [...] her delicate neck and cheek and purely-cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty which touches us in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness." She'll never directly contradict you (that would be unladylike), the only indicator that she will thwart you at every turn is a "little turning aside of [her] long neck." And she always gets her way.

Eliot's making a point about marriage: partnerships that begin with beautiful illusions based only loosely in reality end in bitterness and alienation: "Just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her husband's solitude -- how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him." Better to be uncomfortably familiar with the faults and short-comings of your partner than to jump into a relationship that seems perfect, and that you imagine will only get better.